José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda, best known as the “Father of
the Philippines,” was a polymath who came to embody the struggle against European colonialism in Asia, and the visible head of the Philippine nationalist movement at the end of the nineteenth century. Trained as a physician, Rizal was a
gifted linguist who spoke ten languages fluently and was able to converse in
another twelve by the time he was thirty.
He was an experimental scientist, an
artist, and a musician, who also became a celebrated epistolary writer, playwright, poet, essayist, and novelist in both Spanish and Tagalog. His only two
novels, Noli me tangere (1887) and El filibusterismo (1891), which are Rizal’s
best known works, became essential manuals for members of the Philippine independence movement. In them, Rizal portrays and then sharply criticizes the
abuses of the Roman Catholic clergy, especially the enormous wealth of the
Spanish religious orders, their monopoly on ministries, their control of properties,
their abuses of justice, and their mistreatment of the Filipinos in their own land.
Yet the works also offer a vision of reform that heralds a bright future for the
Malay race and the Philippine nation.
